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Chapter 3: The Atomic Moment

Millions of people are born and die, but they never live. Their life is only apparent because they remain rooted in unconsciousness. And whatsoever you do on the surface may not be true about you at all; in fact, exactly the opposite is the case. That’s why Sigmund Freud has to go into your dreams to see your reality. Just see the irony of it: your reality has to be searched for in your dreams, not in your reality. You cannot be believed - what you say about yourself. Your dreams have to be asked, because you have become so false and you are wearing so many masks that it is almost impossible to penetrate to your original face.

But it is very difficult to know your original face, even from dreams and dream analysis. Who is going to do the analysis? Freud is as unconscious as you are. One unconscious person is trying to interpret the dreams of another unconscious person. His interpretations are bound to be very limited; his interpretations will reflect more about him than about you. That’s why if you go to a Freudian analyst with the same dream, you will get a different interpretation than you will get if you go to a Jungian analyst or to an Adlerian analyst - and now there are many. And you will be puzzled: a single dream has different interpretations. They are not saying anything about you, they are saying something about themselves. The Jungian is saying, “I am a Jungian. This is my interpretation.” Your dreams cannot reveal your truth. If your conscious activities cannot reveal you, how can your sleep activities reveal you? But still, Freud is on the right track. One has to go a little deeper.

One has to go beyond the dreams to a state of mind where no thought, no dream, no desire exists; when all thinking.. And dreaming is a kind of thinking, a primitive kind of thinking - thinking through pictures - but it is still thinking. When you have gone beyond thinking, and if you can still remain alert, aware, as if one is fast asleep but still alert - deep down at the very core of one’s being a lamp goes on burning, a small candle of light - then you will see your original face. And to see your original face is to be back in the Garden of Eden. Then you drop all your clothes.

Your personality consists only of clothes and clothes and clothes - clothes upon clothes. Remember two words which will be very important to understand this strange but immensely valuable book, The Secret of the Golden Flower: one word is essence, the other word is personality. Personality comes from a root, persona which means a mask. In ancient days, the actors in Greek dramas used to wear masks. Persona means a mask; personality comes from persona. The actors used to wear one mask, you are wearing many, because for different situations you need different masks. When you are talking to your boss you need one kind of mask and when you are talking to your servant, of course, you need another kind of mask. How can you use the same mask?